Kitchen

So, I know that I said I was going to look at Ellis’ room next, but I’ve decided to move into the kitchen for one major reason: I’m going to be changing it, and soon (hopefully).

We have plans to extend our house to the side and add on another bedroom, utility, shower room and a bigger entrance, but I’ll get into that another time. But once we get the contractors in to start demolishing the garage (which needs to be emptied beforehand) I’m also going to get them to knock down the wall between the dining room and the kitchen… it’s just decorative anyway.

Anyway, the kitchen started out almost as empty as a kitchen can get…

Some nasty laminate flooring, net curtains and a door with a cat door, minus the flap (which was awesome when we were working on it in October, hence the left behind poster stuffed in the hole there…).

The other side had a couple small base cabinets and the sink and cabinet just under the window, with a couple spaces for a washing machine and cooker (stove). Also note the hideous backsplash…

I changed the flooring pretty early on to some vinyl tiles to brighten up the place.

And the floor looked pretty amazing for a couple of weeks, until we actually moved in and got all of our appliances. Tiles started shifting and the adhesive was coming up making a huge mess and collecting dirt, so it’s not as great as before, but it’s better than when we moved in.

We don’t actually have that much by way of kitchen tools, plates, etc., but we sure as hell needed more storage. Where did the previous tenants keep their dry food? They had a couple of shelves up on the wall when we looked at it, but that was it. We also had no appliances (except for an old washer and dryer that were gifted to me by a former client when we moved into our old place… but the dryer had since broken, and the washer was on its way out too, so I threw it up on ebay and made £50, woot!), so I set out ordering appliances and cabinets pretty soon after getting the floor down.

Anyway… the laminate countertop and cabinets are not in great shape, and we’ve always had a plan to really fix up the kitchen when we could, not only to make it look a bit nicer, but to make it much more functional and work for us. As it is, only one person can be in the kitchen at a time and with our washer in there, I can’t even open one of the drawers, and the door to the “corner cabinet” doesn’t open all the way. Also, we’re pretty sure there’s a rat roaming around back there, as evidenced by a few chewed up sponges… Needless to say, I’ve been planning what we’re going to do for a while, and I’ve decided on a general scheme for the room, which helped with picking out our starter set of cabinets.

It’s pretty standard, but we are going for dark base cabinets and white wall cabinets with brass colored handles. So we headed over to Ikea to have a look at their styles (which I highly recommend doing before ordering online as they almost never look the same as they do in real life, especially when you’re looking at something as pricey as your entire kitchen!).

After deciding on which ones we liked I went home, measured and ordered everything online (no need to spend any more time in Ikea than necessary). I also had some excellent labeling help at home:

After installing our cooker, fridge/freezer, washing machine and dryer, I finally go to installing our cabinets and getting a little creative with our former headboard